You are told to turn off your cellphone ringer in church, in the movie theater, and in courtrooms. But now, a venue where you would expect the same rule to apply is actually encouraging you to let your phone ring.
It’s a unique concert where the cellphone takes center stage. Not only can your cellphone ring—it should. Chicago newspapers are reporting that U.S. jazz composer David Baker is encouraging people to use their phones during the debut performance of “Concertino for Cellular Phones and Orchestra” that will open the 20th anniversary season of the Chicago Sinfonietta classical music festival next month.
In this one-of-a-kind performance audience members and the orchestra will be asked to use their cellphones at various points throughout the piece with “red and green lights telling them when to turn their phones on and off.” Can you imagine? Finally, the perfect place for all of the cellphone addicts in your life. Now if they can just stop talking on them long enough to participate in the concert.
According to newspaper reports, Baker, who has more than 2,000 jazz, symphonic and chamber compositions to his credit, said “people will also be encouraged to randomly increase and decrease the volume of their ring tones and try to recognize familiar tune fragments on the ring tones sounding on orchestra members’ cellphones.”
Baker went on to say that he hoped “the contrast of chaos and structure in a constantly shifting orchestral scheme would replicate how cell phones create both order and chaos in our society.” Anyone who has been in a club or at a party packed with teens knows all about the chaos that can ensue when dozens of cellphones go off at once.
Baker told local reporters that this was first time in his career that he had finished a piece, which featured cellphones, and did not know what the result would be. “There’s just no way to replicate 1,000 cell phones going off at once,” he said.
Hope someone records it.